“... Montaigne, but was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”

“... San was chiefly the work of the Dutch, and some British historians have accepted this view, but John Philip, a hawk-eyed missionary in the 1820s, knew that this wasn’t so. The system ‘which rendered the Dutch name so infamous’, he wrote, is now being carried on ‘in all its horrors’ under the British Government: ‘Impatient to obtain undisturbed ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... conceptualised witchcraft as a conspiracy against an established monotheistic religion. Pope John XXII (1249-1334) was an enthusiastic enemy of witches and magicians, and his actions against them – issuing injunctions, launching investigations, executing malefactors – caused reverberations as far away as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up ...”

“... between the leaders of Britain and America was dogged by tensions neatly characterised by John Grigg when he wrote that Churchill became jealous of Roosevelt’s power, while Roosevelt was envious of Churchill’s genius. Grigg took the view that the prime minister ‘resented his enforced subordination to a man ...”

“... Latin and published, it becomes clear how strange the poet’s Christianity was. The poet is John Milton, and the work is De Doctrina Christiana.De Doctrina Christiana matters because it mattered to Milton. You can ignore it and still enjoy his poetry, but if you become seriously interested in Milton your interest will sooner or later extend to his ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... starched cotton petticoat; long drawers; woollen stockings; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkin between her legs because she was menstruating. In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementing heat, her belly in a vice, she ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”

“... up to six thousand couples at once) for which the Moonies are famous. (One of the biggest of these took place in 1982 in Madison Square Garden.) In effect, Moon’s strategy was to attempt to make himself indispensable to the Seoul regime, the KCIA, the CIA and the American Right, apparently on the assumption that with patrons as powerful as these he would be ...”

“... somehow a stiff upper lip makes eloquence all the more arresting. Johnston’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbour he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he ...”

“... and in the forms that she assumed in the women whom he met and slept with. Few, it seems, took much persuading: Bate’s book is full of accounts of women going weak at the knees in the presence of the ‘fiercely sexy’ Hughes, to borrow from a Mills and Boon-style account of him by Erica Jong, who only just managed to resist the ...”

“... suggests that the most attractive thing to Tolstoy about such a relationship was that it took him away from sex, not towards it. But when Chertkov launched a press with the aim of distributing cheap editions of Tolstoy’s writings for a huge public, Sonya feared for the children’s inheritance. When he ...”